The Brief Liberation of Yu Xuanji
The poet Yu Xuanji (840-868 CE) grew up in Chang’an, the cosmopolitan capital of the Tang Dynasty, which was ruled, in her adult years, by the infamously dissipated and negligent Emperor Yizong. When she was 16, she was purchased by a government official named Li Yi and became his concubine. In Li’s house, she would have served as a sort of “second wife” in addition to his public wife. Eventually, that public wife became so jealous that she forced her husband to send Yu away. From age 19 until her execution at 28, Yu was on her own.
In , the options for unmarried and unsupported girls and women who hoped to avoid destitution and homelessness were limited to religion or prostitution. In the nine-year span after leaving Li Yi’s house, the period of her “liberation,” Yu lived as both a Daoist nun and then a courtesan—composing, all the while, a great number of poems striking in their immediacy. The very few sources of
